Wireless Valley, Silicon Wadi and Digital Island – Helsinki, Tel Aviv and Dublin and the Ict Global Production Network Ability Tests: the Role of Values and Test Taking Attitudes

Hyper-capitalism in global Information and Communication Technology (ICT) markets during the late 1990s created a new global production network, shaped by multi-national corporations, international capital flows, and a flourishing of high-tech entrepreneurship. Each of the cities considered here benefited substantially from this growth, but their positions as nodes in the ICT global production network differed markedly, as did their ability to appropriate the value they generated. In Dublin, value creation was based largely on inward technology and capital flows, although indigenous Dublin-based software companies did demonstrate their ability to compete internationally. ICT development in Helsinki and Tel Aviv drew more strongly on the local knowledge base, and benefited from changes in national regulatory and political conditions. In Helsinki, public and private R&D investments supported the highly effective globalisation strategy of Nokia to create a strongly localised, vertically-integrated and strongly specialised sector. Value creation in the more diverse Israeli ICT sector was also based primarily on locally developed technology, university R&D and the commercialisation of technology developed initially for military applications. By the end of the 1990s, the resulting ICT node in Tel Aviv was grounded in the local knowledge-base, technologically diverse, strongly entrepreneurial and globally oriented. Acknowledgements The Genesis of this paper was a comparison of the Helsinki, Dublin and Tel Aviv ICT sectors conducted as part of the OECD Helsinki Territorial Review. We are grateful for the insights of the members of the Expert Group established to examine the Helsinki ICT sector (Dan Steinbock, Columbia Business School; Fabio Terragni, Northern Milan Development Agency; Joe Cortright, Impresa Consulting; Tim Wojan and Nicola Costa, OECD; Laura Paija, ETLA), and for information provided by interviewees during a study visit to Helsinki in September 2001. Valuable comments on an earlier draft of this paper were provided by participants in the 4 Israeli-British-Irish Regional Science Workshop held in Edinburgh, May 2003, the European Regional Science Association Conference, Finland, August 2003 and the Knowledge Based Economy and Regional Economic Development Conference, St Johns, Newfoundland, October 2003. We are also grateful to three anonymous reviewers and the editor of this journal for their valuable comments. Sins of omission or commission are the authors’ alone, however.